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This month's Vanity Fair, the annual and ever-bloated "Hollywood Issue", had a good and remarkably balanced article about US attempts to shut down The Pirate Bay - at least some of which is available for free on the VF site (http://www.vanityfair.com/ - and, while I'm at it, thank you VF for finally putting up a decent site). The article concludes, as so many on this subject do, that the US recording and movie industries are fighting a losing battle against piracy mostly due to their own laggard embrace of webtech to share their product.
While I agree that the lack of legal download options (particularly outside of the US) is part of the problem, I also thought the author missed a few important points. For example, one of the reasons why the DVD market is slowing is over-exploitation of the market by the major studios. For example, IIRC, Peter Jackson's King Kong was released to movie theatres in December 2005 - 14 months later, Amazon.ca lists no fewer than six different DVD editions of the movie for sale. The major studios' greed for DVD dollars, which according to the current conventional wisdom, accounts for as much as 85 per cent of their revenue stream, has over-saturated the market with "director's cuts", "collector's editions", "ultimate editions" within months (in the case of King Kong) of a film's original DVD release. As a result, not only are DVD buffs waiting longer to pick up their favourites on DVD, that kind of "designed-obselesence" in a media product actually encourages piracy - after all, who wants to pay for something that you're only going to want to buy again in two months when the ultra-ultra exclusive remastered collector's director's cut edition comes out. Case in point: I still don't own a copy of Kill Bill on DVD.
I also thought that the article didn't acknowledge the ridiculous cost of movie tickets in most major North American markets - as high as $14 in some Toronto theatres - and the increasingly bad ratio of movies worth seeing to crap being released these days due entirely to a system of dividing ticket sales between the studio releasing the movie and the theatre exhibiting it that sees studios collecting between 50 and 70 per cent of the box office (IIRC, that was the rental percentage for "Revenge of the Sith") for a movie's first week in release. Although the percentage of "rentals" remitted to the studio decreases with every week that a film is in the theatre, most movies don't generate a profit for movie theatres until they've hung around for four to six weeks. Economically, it actually makes less sense for a movie studio to make "good" movies like The Queen or The Departed or even Superman Returns than it does to make proportionally cheaper "critic-proof" pieces of shit like Norbit or Ghost Rider that appeal to the widest possible audience. Bad reviews and a 50 per cent drop in audiences by the end of the week don't matter as long as the movie opens big enough for the studio to collect its millions on that first weekend. And while it's one thing to feed people a constant diet of shit, it's another to expect them to keep lining up to pay for it.
Does any of this justify piracy? No: piracy is straight up theft - just because you have the crowbar doens't mean you're justified in smashing the bully's headlights; two wrongs, etc. etc. It does, however, explain why I think online digital piracy is here to stay. At the same time, that doesn't mean you don't feel a warm goal about sticking it to the man when downlaoding season one of Rome rather than paying the outrageous markup HBO puts on its DVD sets.
All of this is by way of a thought I had while I was listening to my pirated copy of The Long Blondes, "Someone to Drive You Home." Downloading pirate copies is a far better way of discovering new music than a 20 second clip on iTunes and they don't time out if you forget to back up youy iPod for a week or two (fuck you DRM). But it's too bad that there isn't a paypal link or something similar that I could click and give the money for the album directly to the band rather than splitting it with their corporate masters. I wonder if something like that would work....
While I agree that the lack of legal download options (particularly outside of the US) is part of the problem, I also thought the author missed a few important points. For example, one of the reasons why the DVD market is slowing is over-exploitation of the market by the major studios. For example, IIRC, Peter Jackson's King Kong was released to movie theatres in December 2005 - 14 months later, Amazon.ca lists no fewer than six different DVD editions of the movie for sale. The major studios' greed for DVD dollars, which according to the current conventional wisdom, accounts for as much as 85 per cent of their revenue stream, has over-saturated the market with "director's cuts", "collector's editions", "ultimate editions" within months (in the case of King Kong) of a film's original DVD release. As a result, not only are DVD buffs waiting longer to pick up their favourites on DVD, that kind of "designed-obselesence" in a media product actually encourages piracy - after all, who wants to pay for something that you're only going to want to buy again in two months when the ultra-ultra exclusive remastered collector's director's cut edition comes out. Case in point: I still don't own a copy of Kill Bill on DVD.
I also thought that the article didn't acknowledge the ridiculous cost of movie tickets in most major North American markets - as high as $14 in some Toronto theatres - and the increasingly bad ratio of movies worth seeing to crap being released these days due entirely to a system of dividing ticket sales between the studio releasing the movie and the theatre exhibiting it that sees studios collecting between 50 and 70 per cent of the box office (IIRC, that was the rental percentage for "Revenge of the Sith") for a movie's first week in release. Although the percentage of "rentals" remitted to the studio decreases with every week that a film is in the theatre, most movies don't generate a profit for movie theatres until they've hung around for four to six weeks. Economically, it actually makes less sense for a movie studio to make "good" movies like The Queen or The Departed or even Superman Returns than it does to make proportionally cheaper "critic-proof" pieces of shit like Norbit or Ghost Rider that appeal to the widest possible audience. Bad reviews and a 50 per cent drop in audiences by the end of the week don't matter as long as the movie opens big enough for the studio to collect its millions on that first weekend. And while it's one thing to feed people a constant diet of shit, it's another to expect them to keep lining up to pay for it.
Does any of this justify piracy? No: piracy is straight up theft - just because you have the crowbar doens't mean you're justified in smashing the bully's headlights; two wrongs, etc. etc. It does, however, explain why I think online digital piracy is here to stay. At the same time, that doesn't mean you don't feel a warm goal about sticking it to the man when downlaoding season one of Rome rather than paying the outrageous markup HBO puts on its DVD sets.
All of this is by way of a thought I had while I was listening to my pirated copy of The Long Blondes, "Someone to Drive You Home." Downloading pirate copies is a far better way of discovering new music than a 20 second clip on iTunes and they don't time out if you forget to back up youy iPod for a week or two (fuck you DRM). But it's too bad that there isn't a paypal link or something similar that I could click and give the money for the album directly to the band rather than splitting it with their corporate masters. I wonder if something like that would work....